The Saturday Snapshot #9

    Faithful reader Tony Galati sends along this snapshot of two New England salts, along with this explanation:

     I've been transferring some old Kodachrome slides to digital. I just did these from a 1972 trip to Nantucket that I took with a buddy the summer I graduated. The town of Nantucket was filled with really old people, hippies, and other assorted characters. We were somewhat of a minority. What better reason to travel?

   While this pair of gentlemen look as sharp as tacks, they offer an opportunity to plug a marvelous article in this week's New Yorker, "The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care," by Larissa MacFarquhar. The story represents top notch reporting and beautiful writing about a vitally important subject, and I can't recommend it enough. It's almost a philosophical work, focusing on the untruths told to dementia patients to make their lives more endurable, and f you want to make the story even more unsettling than it already is, ask yourself, as I did, what it might suggest about the lies we tell each other and ourselves to get through our days.

Waiting for justice that might never come

Set, "Waiting for Godot"

   

     So now we wait.
     The Senate is expected to vote on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court some time over the weekend.
     And the Jason Van Dyke murder trial for the shooting of Laquan McDonald has gone to the jury.
Two events that mesh together, and not just because they are reaching their climax at the same time.
     Both involve the intersection of justice and politics, obviously. Both have been churning social media like a washing machine gone berserk, as partisans argue and evaluate. Like the famous blind men running their hands over an elephant, everybody describes what they perceive before them, never suspecting that the conclusions they reach are based on where they were standing when they began their exploration.
     Waiting is hard. The Kavanaugh hearings went on for only a few days, but transfixed the nation, with Christine Blasey Ford's testimony creating a rippled national shock that for one moment seemed to cut through our national divide into warring camp. Then our division returned, like the metal man in Terminator II, reconstituting itself, the red eye winking to life, raging back in the afternoon with Kavanaugh's angry, deeply partisan rebuttal that demonstrated his unsuitability for the court far more dramatically than the possibility of a 34-year-old drunken attack.
     The Van Dyke trial has been gathering steam for three years, since the release of the video cast a pall over Christmas 2015, and lit the fuse on the implosion of Rahm Emanuel's mayorship. The jury might have delivered its verdict by the time you read this.
     Both situations pivot around figures of authority: Kavanaugh, a right wing judge picked to push extremist positions like overturning Roe v. Wade, constraining voting rights, and unleashing the power of money to control even more than it does. Van Dyke, a cop, holding the power life or death in his hands, literally, working in a city with a national reputation for shootings and unsolved murders.

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Flashback 2000: Near-disaster of biblical proportions

     Facebook isn't the font of fascination it once sorta was. Too many ads. But I glance at it anyway, just to see what's going on, though most of my friends seem to be either expressing outrage—can you BELIEVE what they've done now?—or nostalgia: do you remember caramel bullseyes? (Or a combination of the two, condemning the modern world because kids can't play with Jarts anymore). 
     Others like to put big block memes asking unusual questions. I typically ignore those. But a few days ago I noticed this query on a friend's page, and instantly thought, "Yes! Yes I have!" As outlined in the column below.


     There is no punctuation in the Bible. The Hebrew original, that is. No vowels, either.
     It leads to, umm, flexibility when it comes to interpretation, and scholars have happily frittered away the centuries debating the meaning of this or that particular passage.
     The line that best illustrates this process is from Genesis 22. God, in an antic mood, tells Abraham to go sacrifice his son, Isaac, as a burnt offering. Abraham leads the boy to the mountaintop to do the bloody deed. Isaac, who is no fool, can't help but notice that something is amiss.
     "Behold the fire and the wood," he says. "But where is the lamb for a burnt offering?"
    Abraham answers: "God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son."
    Only that comma, of course, isn't in the original text. So he might have been telling Isaac that his doom is near: "God will provide himself the lamb. For a burnt offering: my son."
      Sure, it's a stretch. But if you spend enough time thinking a certain way, especially when you're young, it makes a lingering impact on your mind, creating a certain perversity of outlook.
     For instance: A current radio ad for an eyeglass store has this tagline: "For people who can't see paying a lot for glasses." The moment I heard it, I smiled, thinking they were slyly communicating that their business overcharges people with bad vision: "For people who can't see, paying a lot for glasses."
     This trait is not always benign. In fact, this week it very nearly cost me hundreds of dollars, not to mention depositing tons of unwanted dirt in the backyard of my new home.
     The previous owners had an above-ground pool. Before I could picture myself lounging by the cool waters, my wife, the lawyer, announced that the pool was a big circular drowning pit, inviting our children and the children in the neighborhood to a watery doom. So out went the pool.
     Leaving behind a hole, 20 feet across and about 6 inches deep. The hole needed to be filled. I saw, at long last, after a quarter-century of neglect, a chance to put all those years of geometry to use. The equation for the area of a circle is branded on my brain: area = π r².

     I'm tempted to go into all the math, but as this is a family newspaper, I'll skip over the complexities and cut to the chase: by multiplying pi and the radius first—perhaps influenced by my youthful biblical bickering—and then squaring them, instead of squaring the radius first, and then multiplying by pi, I managed to get about 900 square feet. A figure three times as large as it should have been.
     Not an abstract, point-off-the-quiz mistake. But a truck-dumping-three-times-as-much-dirt-as-I-need mistake.
     Luckily, I caught it in time, through my natural need to check and recheck things. I realized I was wrong by imagining a square the same size—20 feet across. The area of that, of course, would be easy: 20 x 20, or 400 square feet.
     So how is it, I wondered, stepping back from the brink, that a circle of the same size would have more than twice the area?
     Finally figuring it out, I called the dirt store, which is an experience for a city kid. One phone call, and a big dump truck shows up at your house, the back filled with seven cubic yards of topsoil, which cost $170 and weigh 14,000 pounds.
     The truck dumped it in a pile 4 feet high, in the center of the hole left by the pool.
     And then it began to rain.
     "Better get that dirt spread," the driver said, climbing into his cab. "Because once it gets wet, it turns to muck."
     Which is where we shall leave the author, amateur biblical scholar and math whiz, frantically shoveling this pile of moistening dirt in the driving rain. A humbling experience and, believe it or not, a tonic for a guy who works with his brain all day, and not always successfully at that.
            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 22, 2000

We don't want nobody nobody sent. But we do want onion rings on our salad

  

     What's more Chicago than a salad with onion rings?
     I know you're thinking, "Deep dish pizza. " Or "a hot dog with relish and onions and mustard and all that other stuff Chicago dogs are supposed to come with."
     But that's Cliche Chicago, the food stuffs that once represented the city and to some still do. Even an idol of granite is worn away by excessive worship. Every time I hear a radio commercial for a bank trying to pander to the locals by invoking either deep dish pizza or Chicago dogs, those icons seem a little more dubious, inauthentic, corrupted, like scrip issued by an occupying power.
     Maybe you had to be where I am when looking at my salad: The Palace Grill on Madison, opened in 1938, with its chrome and red vinyl, its black and white checkerboard floor, yet true to its name as the residence of royalty. At least a particular kind of Chicago royalty: hockey players and cops, due to the proximity to the United Center, for the former, and for the latter, across the street from the Office of Emergency Management, plus various cop credit unions and training facilities nearby.
     I'm the least coppish, most unhockeylike person imaginable. I've spent far more time eating at The Palace Grill than I have watching hockey games in my entire life. But even I take on a certain swagger ambling into The Palace. Of course, the welcoming presence of George helps a lot—George Lemperis, the owner, whose cousins bought what was then a 19-stool Skid Row diner in 1955.  It was open 24 hours a day, then they started closing at 3 p.m., more for safety than anything else. 

     George and his father Gus bought the place from his cousins in 1979; he marked his 40th year there, the 80th since The Palace opened in 1938. George makes intense, almost feverish eye contact — really, it's like he's about to punch you in the face — then offer a firm handshake as if we were sealing a real estate transaction.

     "I'm meeting so-and-so's guy," I drawl, naming a Chicago politician.

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The Hairy Who?

Untitled, by Suellen Rocca

     My intention was to take the bus from 900 N. Michigan to Union Station Monday afternoon. But as we passed The Art Institute, I saw the Hairy Who? show had opened, so hopped off, figuring I'd catch a later train.
      Right away I learned something, before  even getting through the museum lobby. The six Chicago artists who formed the colorful 1960s art movement, listed on the banner—Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum—did not, as I had always thought, include Ed Paschke. I don't know where I got the impression that he was part of the group; he just seemed to fit, I suppose, along with Roger Brown, who wasn't involved either. 
    I vaguely knew about the Hairy Who? artists, glanced here and there over the years. Looking at so many of their paintings and drawings, not to mention comic books, chairs, posters, and all the other self-promotion. I couldn't help feeling ... I'm going to hell for this ... underwhelmed. The artwork had a sensibility that echoed everything else of the era, from "Yellow Submarine" to late Salvador Dali, all amateurish and derivative and slapdash. The little glyphs and hollow-head doodles made me think these people were the best high school artists ever.
     That's too harsh. Gladys Nilsson had a certain children's book illustration whimsey, a Richard Lindner-y quality that I admired, or tried to. And I could see Paschke's lucha libre wrestlers and static-wavy TV images prefaced in Karl Wirsum's work. This moment really is the only coherent artistic movement to come out of Chicago, which doesn't elevate so much as condemn us. Maybe we really are the hicks those New Yorkers consider us to be.
      As I moved through the galleries—it's a big show, on two floors of the Art Institute—I started to suspect that perhaps the true genius of the group was not in any one image, even in any one artist, but how these half dozen managed to band together and, collectively, puff their talents, such as they were, into something celebrated half a century later. That takes doing. That's certainly art, of a sort.

Hairy Who? 1966-1969 runs through Jan. 6, 2019.

The Great War of the Wonder Woman, by Gladys Nilsson

Christine Blasey Ford may yet be more important to history than Brett Kavanaugh

     “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” Abraham Lincoln supposedly said when meeting Harriett Beecher Stowe in 1862.
     She wasn’t, of course — the mechanism for the Civil War had been set in motion with the founding of our country, 80 years earlier. Its creation an untenable balance, with an equal number of slave states and free states together in a nation supposedly based on liberty. The conflict was inevitable; Stowe merely wrote a book, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” that helped galvanize Northerners against an injustice all too many were willing to accept.
     The question of slavery seemed settled in 1865, with the defeat of the Confederacy. Though the question of who is a person, who counts, is still the essential issue of America, asked again and again throughout our history — should these former slaves be allowed to have careers in the military? To go to school with white kids? Should employers be obligated to hire them? And what about women? Are they human beings fully formed enough to vote? To fight as soldiers?
     The most recent instance unfolded dramatically last week, as Brett Kavanaugh was not waved onto the Supreme Court by his fellow members of the powerful, ruling class, but instead found himself confronted by an accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, who claims he tried to rape her at a party when they were both teenagers.
     Does it matter? Does she matter? How you answer the question depends on where you stood before asking it. The Republicans, having elected a man who admits molesting women, and contort themselves to tolerate any lie and ignore any infamy, say “No.” They didn’t even want to investigate her claims, because a year into the #MeToo movement, such questions are better left to Hollywood.
     Democrats disagree.

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Just walk out?

 



  

    Every day—make that, every goddamn day—I tell a story, or give my opinion in this space. And you, indulgent friends that you are, read it, which I deeply appreciate.
     Though now I'm looking for your opinion, because I'm confused.
      Last week I just had to visit the new Amazon Go store on South Franklin, part of the $1 trillion sell-everything-to-everybody-all-the-time company's efforts to eliminate all minimum wage jobs from the world by automating a range of jobs from delivery drivers to cashiers. I'm not sure who's going to be able to buy their stuff if nobody is employed, but I guess that's an issue for another day. Though, now that I think of it, judging from the number of employees, in orange fleeces or polos, overseeing the aisles of bottled water and prepackaged sandwiches at Amazon Go, Amazon still has a while to go before it fulfills its corporate dream. 
     Anyway, in the spirit of experiment, I bolted in, grabbed a thin can of iced coffee, and left, the glass gates smoothly sliding apart for me, as $2.49 (plus six cents tax, which seems suspiciously low) was deducted from my credit card account.
     In the two minutes, 13 seconds I was in the store (they time you, like it's a race) I noticed this array of coffee mugs announcing "JUST WALK OUT," the source of my question today:
     "JUST WALK OUT"—is that an appealing slogan? Do you want to own a coffee mug with "JUST WALK OUT" on it? "JUST WALK OUT?" Is that something good? Something to be desired? Aren't the situations where you "just walk out" uniformly bad? Burning buildings. Lousy plays. Crowded restaurant lobbies. 
    It might be nice, I suppose, to grab a few goodies without having to interact with a slack-jawed clerk, whom I end up thanking despite the fact it should really be the other way around. But not so nice that I want to pay $5.99 to celebrate this development on a coffee cup. 
    Or—and here is where you come in—am I missing something? Does "JUST WALK OUT" have some kind of edgy hip appeal which, being old, I am oblivious to? I'm sincerely curious? How did Amazon get to rule the world with such a tin ear? Or is the fault mine?